Talk about adding insult to injury. On the very day last week that some 230 public employees were laid off because the city of Los Angeles is broke, Controller Wendy Greuel announced the city had failed to collect $260 million in bills.

If even half of those bills had been paid, city workers would still be on the job and taxpayers would still be receiving important city services – from libraries to tree trimming to parks maintenance.

But, amazingly, inertia is more powerful in the halls of city government than self-preservation.

Efforts to improve collections have been so painfully slow and bureaucratic that after a concerted three-year effort, Los Angeles’ collection rate increased from 52percent to 53 percent. Just one measly percentage point.

City departments were warned in an audit three years ago that millions of precious dollars were being left on the table because of lax collection practices.

The audit recommended a centralized billing process that would ensure scofflaws’ debts get sent to collections sooner so the city would get its money faster. Yet three years later, city departments are still debating who should collect unpaid bills.

Certainly Los Angeles will not collect 100percent of its bills. Most businesses expect some nonpayment for services and create an allowance for uncollectible debt in order to budget accordingly. Plus, there are some city services provided to the poor and indigent, such as ambulance response, that will have a particularly low collection rate.

But there is no good reason Los Angeles cannot collect parking ticket and burglar alarm bills in a more timely fashion. The older the bill, the harder it is to collect.

Take the unpaid parking tickets example. At one point last year, the city had $210million in outstanding tickets, and $91million of those citations were more than two years old. The vendor responsible for processing those tickets ultimately agreed to refer the outstanding bills to collections after four to five years – but the statute of limitations on parking tickets is five years.

Last year the Los Angeles Police Commission collected on $166,000, or 29 percent of $576,000 owed, in fees for false burglar alarms. That money is supposed to reimburse the Police Department for the time officers waste responding to false alarms, but that much-needed funding isn’t coming in.

It’s unconscionable that Los Angeles is still unable to collect outstanding bills, especially when the city is penny-pinching taxpayers in so many areas. And worse yet, those who ultimately pay for noncollection aren’t the offenders but workers and taxpayers of the city.

We call on elected officials to put aside cost-cutting schemes for the moment and focus on better debt collection for a few moments.